My Mosin-Nagant M38 Carbine

I bought my Mosin-Nagant M38 carbine a few months ago. It was cheap ($99.00 cheap), in good condition (rearsenaled Izvezhk production) and ammo is cheap and plentiful. I purchased a black plastic stock for it, but was never happy with it, because the stock is sized to look appropriate on a full-length Mosin-Nagant 91/30, not a carbine like the M38, so instead of looking graceful and modern, it simply looked stubby and wrong.

Thus I decided to refinish the original wooden stock that came with the rifle. For the last several days I've been sanding, stripping, and applying boiled linseed oil to the wood; this morning, with the wood dry and attractive, I reassembled the rifle, and it looks like this:



I like the look of this pale oiled stock more than the dark varnish that came with the rifle. I'm satisfied.

Note: if you wish to finish a Mosin-Nagant in a similar fashion, I'd recommend starting by using stripper on all the varnished parts of the stock, it will save you a lot of sanding. I used the stripper on the upper handguard after sanding the rest of the stock dry, and the varnish after a half hour simply wiped off entirely. I cursed quite a bit at all the hours of sanding I would have saved by stripping it all off before ever grabbing a sanding block.